One of the things I was hoping was that the changes to the built-in CD burning utility would be fixed.
FreeBSD evidently doesn't have a SCSI/IDE emulation layer, so applications like cdrdao don't work with any IDE burners. It does have a very nice and intuitive IDE burning utility, called burncd, that works for most things. I even set it up to burn dreamcast CDs.
However, it lacks one thing I really want - the ability to burn VCDs. I wouldn't have asked for it, since I'm certainly not qualified to program it myself, but it was added to -CURRENT last December, along with disc-at-once capabilities.
I was rather hoping it'd make it into 4.5, but I guess I'll just have to hope for it to hit 4.6.;-) I'd use -CURRENT except that I don't feel comfortable with my skills quite yet.
I found the news just above the 2b announcement to be a bit more interesting.
Evidently the random number generator ran_array / RNARRAY from Volume 2 had some problems. As I read it, if one seed is used many times, it would produce numbers that passed randomness tests; but one user tried many different seeds for only a few generations - which began to fail randomness tests.
The remarkable thing Knuth noted was that two different methods of fixing it were found by Richard Brent. The first was to discard the first 2000 numbers; the other was just basic improvement of the initialization of the algorithm.
I'm very curious as to why this is; my understanding of seminumerical theory is limited to what I've read in Knuth, but I'm still very interested in the causes of this problem.
Does anybody know if there's a place I can check to see if changes made to -CURRENT are being brought into 4.5? I'm particularly curious about some changes made to the IDE CD-Burner technology, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a waste of (their) time to e-mail developers or mailing lists, particularly if there's a place that lists all the changes for the new release.
(Or maybe I should sit on my hands until the 20th, when I can check it online.;-)
Reminds me of something out of revelations or Nostrodomos about not being able to do any business without the mark of the beast (if I remember the quote correctly).
I seriously doubt that this was organized by anyone high level at MS.. probably just a salesman who thought it would be a good idea to get everyone to vote in the poll.
The question on my mind... was he fired - or promoted?
One of the more interesting applications of the SMB protocol has, in my experience, been the smbfs part of FreeBSD. It's not very well known, but it's incredible easy to use - nowadays it's even part of the base system; no port needed.
One of my machines boots into both BSD and windows; the other one serves as a Samba server so that I can share media and data. Using smbfs, I was able to put a line into/etc/fstab that mounted all my SMB shares at bootup. Then I was able to share JPilot information,.vimrc's and so forth.
City Start Max Stop
Los Angeles 12:04 1:10 2:12
Seattle 12:22 12:48 1:14
Denver 1:48 2:38 3:24
Chicago 3:08 3:59 sunset
Miami 4:14 5:25 sunset
New York 4:13 sunset --
Mexico City 2:45 4:13 5:26
That's patently false, as evidenced by this article and the swarm of articles preceding it. IE costs "us" time, stress, and ultimately, yes, money. Because you do not pay directly does not mean that it does not cost you anything - sure, I got a "free" watch at Ward's at Christmastime a couple of years ago, but I had to buy a bunch of other crap to be eligible. IE is not "without cost," and believing that it is will only further cement the idea in your head that Microsoft is a benevolent entity seeking only to provide customers with pleasure.
And as for the virus scan - I pay for an airbag; but I don't think it's the airbag manufacturer's fault when the engine explodes and burns me alive.
which is a small % of the overall problem. Same as Microsoft's activation policy...since when did the average consumer become the enemy?
I was under the impression that the RIAA knew what kind of an impact casual copying had and was going after it anyway. Same thing with Microsoft - one of the targets they're hitting square on is the family, thus the family license! It may be only a small portion of their 'lost revenues,' and almost certainly they know this, but they're targetting anyway.
I think the consumer became the enemy when they were first identified as Consumers rather than People.
I dig Theo. OpenBSD just scored personality points in my book.
You know, I agree completely. I'd been wary of Theo, for a lot of the reasons that most everybody else is - he seemed like a jerk, uncompromising, and so on, all because of the attitude the community [Slashdot] takes toward him.
But that article, and interview, really puts him in a new light. He doesn't take any crap, but he seems like a nice guy, he seems like he's got a sense of humor, and he certainly does live the coding life he wants to. I especially liked the Rock-Star Operating System lifestyle comment.
In my experience, Postgre was really easy to get running, as (IIRC) it comes in the Cygwin package - you can choose to install it from the get-go.
As far as Bash goes, I definitely agree - it was wonderful to finally get it running, but even more so was using rxvt right in the Windows environment. Now on my Win95 box (at work we shunned the auto-upgrade policy) I could get a scrolling command prompt! I could finally collect all those wxPython tracebacks...;-)
...but as for XFree86, I definitely don't think it's as easy as the other two. Cygwin runs under an internet "stub" installer, whereas with XF you download about eighty packages, then navigate through the directory structure... blah blah. It runs very well - that's not in question - it's just the installation that isn't quite so easy.
"Almost Heroes" is such an abomination that one actually wishes Chris Farley had kicked off long before he got anywhere near this script. The filmmakers would have been kinder to Farley's memory by taking a collective piss on his rotting corpse."
Let's hope that the new Adams book is a better experience. Don't most authors include something in their wills about not publishing unfinished materials?
"As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth."
In particular, be sure to read the very bottom of the article:
Before you fire up your e-mail program to contest the results or suggest some neat trick to get even more out of either the Linux benchmark server or the FreeBSD server, remember what I said at the beginning of this review: This was not a scientific benchmark in a professional benchmarking lab. All results are only valid within my own environment and you are certainly bound to see a different result on your machines. The benchmark was only about finding out how well Linux handles stress loads compared to FreeBSD, and I do not claim that one OS is better than the other one.
These aren't scientific. These are the results one person sees - and also note that the various problems presented to the servers give different results. FreeBSD and Linux both had strengths and weaknesses even in his tests.
Rumors are that CD-Audio format media benefit from some strip of data that enables them to be used in regular, standalone CD recorders. Is this true? What is the actual difference between these and regular CD-R's? Is there a program to convert them, or is it on a hardware level?
(note that Matt is not against NRA, he is a member)
Can you verify this? I'm fairly certain all the jokes in the 138th episode spectacular were just jokes. The cash register actually doesn't say NRA4EVR, but something like 847.63 - the average cost of raising a baby for a week or something like that.
All I've heard about Matt's politics were stories about him hanging out with the Zappa clan in the 80's.
Hey, remember that time Felten wrote a paper and couldn't release it cuz it was a circumvention device?
Or that time I wanted to play DVDs in Linux and couldn't because I needed a circumvention device?
Or when some Russian dude got locked up away from his family because he wanted to let blind people use eBooks?
Overzealous my ass. This is a problem and we need to take a stand, whether it's "reasonable" or not. People need to understand what is at stake - and what better way to help that process than by showing them?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things I was hoping was that the changes to the built-in CD burning utility would be fixed.
;-) I'd use -CURRENT except that I don't feel comfortable with my skills quite yet.
FreeBSD evidently doesn't have a SCSI/IDE emulation layer, so applications like cdrdao don't work with any IDE burners. It does have a very nice and intuitive IDE burning utility, called burncd, that works for most things. I even set it up to burn dreamcast CDs.
However, it lacks one thing I really want - the ability to burn VCDs. I wouldn't have asked for it, since I'm certainly not qualified to program it myself, but it was added to -CURRENT last December, along with disc-at-once capabilities.
I was rather hoping it'd make it into 4.5, but I guess I'll just have to hope for it to hit 4.6.
# fgrep Vote *.c
// Vote Adams in '96!
I need to order new Rubber for my Jack Bot sometime too.
There are just SO many ways to go with that one.
I found the news just above the 2b announcement to be a bit more interesting.
Evidently the random number generator ran_array / RNARRAY from Volume 2 had some problems. As I read it, if one seed is used many times, it would produce numbers that passed randomness tests; but one user tried many different seeds for only a few generations - which began to fail randomness tests.
The remarkable thing Knuth noted was that two different methods of fixing it were found by Richard Brent. The first was to discard the first 2000 numbers; the other was just basic improvement of the initialization of the algorithm.
I'm very curious as to why this is; my understanding of seminumerical theory is limited to what I've read in Knuth, but I'm still very interested in the causes of this problem.
Does anybody know if there's a place I can check to see if changes made to -CURRENT are being brought into 4.5? I'm particularly curious about some changes made to the IDE CD-Burner technology, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a waste of (their) time to e-mail developers or mailing lists, particularly if there's a place that lists all the changes for the new release.
;-)
(Or maybe I should sit on my hands until the 20th, when I can check it online.
Reminds me of something out of revelations or Nostrodomos about not being able to do any business without the mark of the beast (if I remember the quote correctly).
Thank god the CueCat went down, eh?
I seriously doubt that this was organized by anyone high level at MS.. probably just a salesman who thought it would be a good idea to get everyone to vote in the poll.
The question on my mind... was he fired - or promoted?
One of the more interesting applications of the SMB protocol has, in my experience, been the smbfs part of FreeBSD. It's not very well known, but it's incredible easy to use - nowadays it's even part of the base system; no port needed.
/etc/fstab that mounted all my SMB shares at bootup. Then I was able to share JPilot information, .vimrc's and so forth.
One of my machines boots into both BSD and windows; the other one serves as a Samba server so that I can share media and data. Using smbfs, I was able to put a line into
* If you type into the URL bar while a page is loading, your text is no longer overwritten when the page load completes.
This alone is worth the upgrade, in my book... I hadn't realized until now how much the *shudder* other way of doing it pisses me off...
I'm pretty sure he's said several times that there's no way he's going to do 7-9, but I suppose that could have changed in the intervening time.
I found this hilarious.
I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.
I wonder if that e-mail address still works so I can let him know that Episode 1 wasn't worth it...
Space.com has a viewing guide with some times for different locations.
City Start Max Stop
Los Angeles 12:04 1:10 2:12
Seattle 12:22 12:48 1:14
Denver 1:48 2:38 3:24
Chicago 3:08 3:59 sunset
Miami 4:14 5:25 sunset
New York 4:13 sunset --
Mexico City 2:45 4:13 5:26
"But, heck, it's FREE. IE costs us nothing."
That's patently false, as evidenced by this article and the swarm of articles preceding it. IE costs "us" time, stress, and ultimately, yes, money. Because you do not pay directly does not mean that it does not cost you anything - sure, I got a "free" watch at Ward's at Christmastime a couple of years ago, but I had to buy a bunch of other crap to be eligible. IE is not "without cost," and believing that it is will only further cement the idea in your head that Microsoft is a benevolent entity seeking only to provide customers with pleasure.
And as for the virus scan - I pay for an airbag; but I don't think it's the airbag manufacturer's fault when the engine explodes and burns me alive.
This is fairly reminiscient of other stupid crossover attempts by "artists" speaking outside their medium.
which is a small % of the overall problem. Same as Microsoft's activation policy...since when did the average consumer become the enemy?
I was under the impression that the RIAA knew what kind of an impact casual copying had and was going after it anyway. Same thing with Microsoft - one of the targets they're hitting square on is the family, thus the family license! It may be only a small portion of their 'lost revenues,' and almost certainly they know this, but they're targetting anyway.
I think the consumer became the enemy when they were first identified as Consumers rather than People.
I dig Theo. OpenBSD just scored personality points in my book.
You know, I agree completely. I'd been wary of Theo, for a lot of the reasons that most everybody else is - he seemed like a jerk, uncompromising, and so on, all because of the attitude the community [Slashdot] takes toward him.
But that article, and interview, really puts him in a new light. He doesn't take any crap, but he seems like a nice guy, he seems like he's got a sense of humor, and he certainly does live the coding life he wants to. I especially liked the Rock-Star Operating System lifestyle comment.
This was a great interview to post.
In my experience, Postgre was really easy to get running, as (IIRC) it comes in the Cygwin package - you can choose to install it from the get-go.
;-)
...but as for XFree86, I definitely don't think it's as easy as the other two. Cygwin runs under an internet "stub" installer, whereas with XF you download about eighty packages, then navigate through the directory structure... blah blah. It runs very well - that's not in question - it's just the installation that isn't quite so easy.
As far as Bash goes, I definitely agree - it was wonderful to finally get it running, but even more so was using rxvt right in the Windows environment. Now on my Win95 box (at work we shunned the auto-upgrade policy) I could get a scrolling command prompt! I could finally collect all those wxPython tracebacks...
...a review Mr. Cranky wrote of Almost Heroes.
"Almost Heroes" is such an abomination that one actually wishes Chris Farley had kicked off long before he got anywhere near this script. The filmmakers would have been kinder to Farley's memory by taking a collective piss on his rotting corpse."
Let's hope that the new Adams book is a better experience. Don't most authors include something in their wills about not publishing unfinished materials?
"As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth."
In particular, be sure to read the very bottom of the article:
Before you fire up your e-mail program to contest the results or suggest some neat trick to get even more out of either the Linux benchmark server or the FreeBSD server, remember what I said at the beginning of this review: This was not a scientific benchmark in a professional benchmarking lab. All results are only valid within my own environment and you are certainly bound to see a different result on your machines. The benchmark was only about finding out how well Linux handles stress loads compared to FreeBSD, and I do not claim that one OS is better than the other one.
These aren't scientific. These are the results one person sees - and also note that the various problems presented to the servers give different results. FreeBSD and Linux both had strengths and weaknesses even in his tests.
NetBeans is an amazing IDE, although it was a bit slow on my 400 Celeron at work.
Rumors are that CD-Audio format media benefit from some strip of data that enables them to be used in regular, standalone CD recorders. Is this true? What is the actual difference between these and regular CD-R's? Is there a program to convert them, or is it on a hardware level?
Learning how to cope with this Hypermedia -- especially in a crisis -- is now as critical to survival as combatting terrorism.
Yeah, remember that time CNN.com blew up a truck in front of the US Embassy?
(note that Matt is not against NRA, he is a member)
Can you verify this? I'm fairly certain all the jokes in the 138th episode spectacular were just jokes. The cash register actually doesn't say NRA4EVR, but something like 847.63 - the average cost of raising a baby for a week or something like that.
All I've heard about Matt's politics were stories about him hanging out with the Zappa clan in the 80's.
Hey, remember that time Felten wrote a paper and couldn't release it cuz it was a circumvention device?
Or that time I wanted to play DVDs in Linux and couldn't because I needed a circumvention device?
Or when some Russian dude got locked up away from his family because he wanted to let blind people use eBooks?
Overzealous my ass. This is a problem and we need to take a stand, whether it's "reasonable" or not. People need to understand what is at stake - and what better way to help that process than by showing them?